Brown to GOP rivals: Let’s debate

Poizner favors idea, Whitman doesn’t

LOS ANGELES  Presumptive Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown sought to shake up the campaign for governor Saturday by challenging the two principal Republican contenders to a series of bipartisan pre-primary debates.

“This is going to be mano a mano — one candidate against the other,” Brown said in a speech to the California Democratic Party convention. “Let’s hear the different ideas. Let’s talk about them, whether it’s jobs or state spending or what to do about taxes or immigration or whether or not we’re going to keep laying off teachers.”

Predictably, Brown’s challenge set off a day of e-mail exchanges involving the Republican campaigns of Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

Poizner promptly took Brown up on his call for debates, but Whitman deflected it.

Less than two hours later, she issued a second statement saying Brown “should debate his own primary opponent, Richard Aguirre, as we’ve done and as we will do again in two weeks.”

That prompted a blast from Poizner spokesman Jarrod Agen, who said, “The Republican nominee will have to debate Jerry Brown. If Meg Whitman is afraid to debate him, then she should not be the Republican nominee.”

These are unsettling times for Democrats in California and across the country. President Barack Obama’s approval rating has dropped sharply as unemployment continues to hover around 10 percent and Washington is gripped by partisan rancor.

Historically, a new president’s party loses seats in Congress in the first midterm election.

And despite California’s increasingly Democratic leanings, a Field Poll last month showed Whitman running slightly ahead of Brown in the general election. Also, all three of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s potential Republican challengers — former Rep. Tom Campbell, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Irvine — were running neck and neck with her.

Both Democrats acknowledged the political climate.

“Yeah, there’s some anxiety out there, but we’re on the move, Democrats,” Brown said in his speech.

Boxer, a three-term incumbent, told a convention news conference, “People want change, but there are a lot of folks out there who are afraid of change.”

She added, “It’s a tough time to be running, and I don’t sugarcoat that.”

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and a handicapper of congressional elections, rates the California Senate race as a tossup.

“I never would have believed it,” he said. “I’ve heard every time she runs that she can’t win, this is the time her number’s up, and she always wins easily.”

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, said the mood at the convention seemed abnormally flat, which should alarm Democrats.

“The arithmetic says it shouldn’t be a bad year regardless of what happens nationally,” Jeffe said. “But the sense I’m getting so far out of this meeting is that the enthusiasm is far more muted than it is among Republicans. That is the major problem that the Democratic Party will have to face. It doesn’t matter how far ahead you are in registration if your voters don’t come out.”